Next month, Mimi Zieman, M.D.’s memoir of her journey from New York City to Mount Everest, Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure, will be released. There is no reason you should know her, if you are focused on mountain literature. This is her first and probably only book on the subject. She worked and cared for Ed Webster, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables. It’s not your traditional mountaineering story. Tap Dancing on Everest is actually a feminist story of self-discovery, with a mixture of adventure and medicine, from Falcon Guides. And, yes, I wanted to read it despite the central objective being Mount Everest.

So, about that: Let’s get my Everest disclaimer out of the way. If you know my take, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph. Here goes: Contemporary Everest is over publicized, which is a way of saying it’s overrated. Today, Everest is crowded, over commercialized, suitable for an adventure but not a wilderness experience, which means that it is no longer one of the most compelling mountain climbs. The real climbs that are significant today are happening on other mountains.

Now, let me give my explanation why I reviewed this book, despite my caveats: When permits to climb Everest were few and far between, before the 1990s, the attempts and ascents were genuinely interesting. The mountain was still wilderness, without base camp villages, commercial teams, helicopter re-supplies, and wifi. Take legendary alpinist Ed Webster’s three climbs on the peak, which he recounted in his book Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest (2000), and culminated in his masterpiece in 1988. Back then, he wanted to climb in a purer fashion. He shunned packing radios. Tap Dancing on Everest dealt with this 1988 expedition, but that’s not the only reason I accepted the opportunity to read and review it.

I wanted to read it because of this line in the email from the publicist: “This was the expedition that Mimi Zieman, then 25 and still in her third year of medical school in New York City, joined as the lone woman of the team to serve in the capacity of medical officer.” I hadn’t read a book about a support team member. And this was a new perspective on a significant climb. Significant, as in on a National Geographic map of historical climbs, it’s one of only nine highlighted routes. And Zieman wasn’t another dude from the era, but a strong and independent woman. Well, the description didn’t claim that, but from that description and that climb, I concluded she must be worth reading about.

Zieman’s book is autobiographical through her 25th year of life. She was born to an immigrant family living in New York City. There was danger of theft and abuse around many corners in her neighborhood. But she found respite through the challenges of life, urban life in New York City in the 1970s, in jazz and tap dancing. The way climbing guarded Jon Krakauer, as he said it in Into the Wild, from a “post adolescent fog,” tap dancing lifted Zieman’s eyes with purpose and joy. She also said that she learned from her parents, that a second life was possible through “hard work, intelligence, and wits.”

A series of intentional and accidental events all paved her way to Mount Everest. From New York to Colorado, from Colorado to the Annapurna Circuit, from the Annapurna Circuit to meeting mountaineer Robert Anderson and being invited on as medical officer of an ambitious climbing team. The linkages must be read, and even when things didn’t go as hoped, still brought some remarkable results.

My favorite segment was during her solo trek through the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal. According to Zieman, women didn’t do this alone in those days. (Yet, she meets another solo trekker at Everest Base Camp, rare, but not absolutely unheard about.) She carried an inappropriate backpack for the duration, and made some wonderful discoveries about human endurance and attitude. She also applied her knowledge gained in Colorado: Move swiftly over a field of deep pebbles, otherwise you’ll sink for a brief moment only before slipping terribly.

As a medical student, with some experience at Himalayan altitude, Anderson recruited Zieman for the team he and Ed Webster were forming to ascend Everest’s East Face by a new route, its second. They invited Stephen Venables later. It didn’t hurt that Anderson was romantically attracted to Zieman. Zieman wasn’t sure what was going on between them, until they arrived at Base Camp and they shared a tent.

As Zieman tells her story, she shares a steady perspective on the human body throughout. The body is a stronger theme than is tap dancing as a source and symbol of strength and joy. The story weaves details about her body, her mother’s shape, people disrespecting their body in various ways, the crude solutions to care for a human body from urination to catheters, poor health, medicine, and its frailty. I found it somewhat uncomfortable yet liberating. As a parent cleaning up a lot of bodily messes, I have found the body is a messy thing we try to dress it in dignity. Zieman’s work globalized what I learned.

As a climbing story, this was every bit Zieman’s story and perspective. Looking at Webster, Anderson, Venables, and the other expedition members, they were her friends and patients first. She danced and drank with them. She treated them for digestive troubles, altitude sickness, frostbite, and helped them relieve themselves when they were too weak. Some of the medical care was wonderfully vivid. Undignified moments with climbing legends. Legend or not, it was graphic, real, and it even made me chuckle. This was why the book is a climbing related story, not a climbing story.

I didn’t like the first chapter. Zieman opens at Advanced Base Camp, peering into the white nothingness, waiting for the overdue climbers to return. It made me ask questions I was curious about the answers — what an author does to keep us reading — but it seemed overreaching and borderline sappy. I didn’t start to forgive Zieman until the story arrived in Colorado and fully on the Annapurna Circuit. I was suspicious why I chose to read this, as a mountain book reader, for quite a bit.

This book won’t make it on my list to consider for climbing classics, and I wouldn’t recommend if you’re looking for a great mountaineering story. But I did glean some new appreciation for our medical care providers, and I enjoyed the chance to see things through someone’s eyes who are very different from my own. Plus getting a perspective on someone’s complicated love life with Robert Anderson, was momentarily entertaining too.

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